With the sudden deluge of Thursday night programming it’s easy to get distracted by all the new shows and the returning schmaltz-laden behemoths like Grey’s Anatomy and overlook the consistently excellent, veteran gems. (Really, Grey’s Anatomy? Two whole hours of weeping?) For television that is funny, well written and well acted, thoughtful, often silly and occasionally sincere, awkward and honest in the same breath, it’s hard to get better than what The Office can be at its best.

For a show that started as an intensely derivative reworking of a British show, The Office has managed to move so far out of the initial emotional and situational territory that it has far and away surpassed its original. As the head manager of the Dunder Mifflin Scranton branch, Michael Scott has developed from an unthinking, heartless buffoon into something much more complex and interesting. It’s not that he’s unthinking, we now realize, he’s childlike and eager to be liked but lacking in any rudimentary understanding of tact or social norms. Michael Scott’s childishness is also an emotional state, leading him to feel jealousy and love with equal intensity and making him incapable of dealing with either. He is also an excellent salesman, an ambitious but well-meaning boss, and occasionally a selfish bastard.

The many faces of Michael Scott

This is why television that lives for a long time can be a really amazing thing – there is no way that Michael Scott could be what he fully is today in just twelve half-hour episodes. Most of the credit for his development goes to the show’s willingness to change. Unlike so many other sitcoms or even hour-long dramas (I turn once again to you, Grey’s Anatomy), The Office has never been afraid to change. Things actually happen on The Office – Jim moved to the Stamford branch, Pam and Roy split, Michael left to create his own paper company, Michael fell in love with Holly and then had to break up with her when she was transferred. Perhaps most admirably, the writers completely refuse to limit the show to boring unresolved Pam and Jim tension and are fully able to write a funny, tense show with their two main love interests in a happy, committed relationship. Sure, like most shows, the situational status quo usually returns. Main characters who leave will come back. Mergers and takeovers happen, but end up reinstating the norm. The show has to come back to the standard arrangement, because it’s The Office, and we want to see all of our favorite characters working together. When characters come back from wherever they went, though, or they break up with each other, or get back together, they also come back as different, more interesting people. That’s how you start with one-note jerk Michael Scott and slowly arrive at the far more complicated Michael Scott of today.

Jim and Pam, defying sitcom standards

It would be unfair to finish off this paean to The Office without mentioning the rest of the cast. After all, it is an office full of people, and each character is fully formed, and funny, and capable of carrying entire plots and subplots by themselves. I loved Phyllis’s wedding to Bob Vance, Vance Refrigeration. I loved Kelly’s relationship with Ron from the loading dock. And maybe I love Andy Bernard most of all. (Any episode where he sings or deals at all with his college acapella group Here Comes Treble is an instant classic for me.)

Your heads may be turned by the shiny new programs, the sexy vampires and sexy doctors and sexy lawyers, the biggest losers and real housewives and people who think they can dance. You may be distracted for a while, but every week, The Office gives us another example of How To Make Good Television. We could do a lot worse than to pay some attention.

Tonight ABC is airing the premiere of the new half-hour comedy Modern Family. The premise of the show is the examination of several families, all of them in some way removed from the 1950s nuclear family. There are Jay and Gloria with at least a decade’s age difference between them and Gloria’s child from a previous marriage, the gay couple Mitchell and Cameron who have just adopted a baby, and the most conventional of the bunch, Phil and Claire. Although Phil and Claire have been married sixteen years and have three children, their household looks nothing like the Draper residence – Phil struggles to be the cool dad, Claire strives to be the all-powerful super mom, and they both carefully study their daily calendar to find time to discipline their son.

Phil and Claire, Jay and Gloria, Cameron and Mitchell

Modern Family does not revolutionize the classic sitcom subject matter. Sitcoms are built around family units (often actually relatives but roommates will do just fine), and undoubtedly the most common sitcom premise is the unusual family. Full House was about two bachelors moving into a house with a widower to help him raise his three daughters. Friends was about a group of young New Yorkers who were also occasionally lovers, siblings, roommates, and ex-spouses. On Fresh Prince of Bel-Aire there was awkward relative Will Smith, on Family Matters there was awkward neighbor Urkel, and on The Cosby Show the audience marveled at the daily life of a normal, comfortable, well-educated, African-American family.

Weird families are funny. But recently, the sitcom has been a dying genre because it has failed to keep pace with the increasing weirdness of the American family unit. The funniest half-hour comedies of recent years have had to either turn the genre on its head and joke about the whole premise (see, How I Met Your Mother) or scrap the sitcom altogether and reinvent the form (awesomely, The Office).

It's the ciiiiiircle of life...

All of which is to say, Modern Family is actually quite entertaining. And it’s because the show reclaims classic sitcom territory, the contemporary American family, with an entirely new central idea – sure, these people don’t look like The Donna Reed Show, but their families are not unusual. They are quirky, self-involved, misguided, defensive, distracted individuals, but they don’t need to rely on their unconventional family arrangements for humor. For them (and, of course, for us) nothing here is startling. We can laugh at the challenges of two gay men raising a daughter without feeling forced into sociological discovery, but we still get the thrill of recognizing truth in the comedy. Like the best sitcoms, we crack up because a gay man is holding his new daughter aloft as music plays “The Circle of Life,” both because it’s ridiculous and because it’s actually the circle of life.

Between Modern Family, Community, and the new seasons of How I Met Your Mother and The Big Bang Theory, the sitcom is in a surprisingly healthy place. I am surprised. I am pleased.

Well, that was pretty awesome.

As long as I seem to be writing this paper on Mad Men and its historical moment one week at a time, I might as well continue. This episode actually seemed to have quite a bit less to do with cultural or political context, as the events inside Sterling Cooper were without question sufficient to distract from anything going on in the world outside. Who has time to watch the evening news when a young upstart has shown up to demote everyone and you’re being relocated to India and your loser sexually abusive husband can’t even stay on his career path?

Happy 4th of July!

But what Mad Men may have neglected in the way of subtle cultural hints, it traded for full-blown historical allegory. This episode was potently American in a way the show has often played with but seldom taken on with full force. What could be more suggestive of an old world/new world divide than rehashing a question of leadership between Britain and America? As represented by St. John, Lane Pryce and the doomed Guy McFerland, Britain means class, sophistication and privilege, and Betty glows at the possibility of living in London with a pram and a real nanny. Britain is also unmistakably the old way of life, stuffy and staid, and thanks to its British overlords, Sterling Cooper seems to be sinking further into the past while Don Draper courts new American royalty in the form of Conrad Hilton. How appropriate that the British invade on the 4^th of July, forcing the Sterling Cooper secretaries to ironically reverse the significance of the holiday with tiny British flags on their desks. Watch the episode again, and just keep an eye out for how many times there’s a tiny British flag in the foreground. Even the uncharacteristic (and thus, impressively shocking) bloodiness was carefully woven back into the allegorical fabric, with Roger commenting that the office looked like Iwo Jima and young copywriters musing about Vietnam. And then to have a John Deere tractor, symbol of hardworking American agriculture, literally mow over poor Guy McFerland, the young, posh, well-educated Briton’s Briton?

An episode like this could have been completely absurd. The allegory, so markedly drawn, could have been unsubtle, thoughtless and simplistic. Instead, “Guy Walks Into an Advertising

And really, what's funnier than a guy squeegee-ing blood off the window?

Agency” was saved from obvious metaphor and transformed into an absolutely gorgeous piece of television by the funny, tragic, sick, uncertain, contemplative mess that surrounded it. Roger Sterling learns he’s not even part of the old guard, he’s actually been written out of the company flowcharts, and he does not find the discovery reassuring. Pete Campbell, so desperate to be respected and viewed as an older authority figure, slides down the ladder a bit and ends the episode with the same thwarted ambition he’s always felt. What most saved the allegory from over-determined silliness, though, was the persistent sick humor of the aftermath. Guy loses his foot, jokes Roger, “right when he got it in the door.” Of course, he can never be an accounts man now because the doctors say he’ll never golf again. And finally, the underlying joke of the whole episode, its title – “Guy Walks Into an Advertising Agency,” but he does not walk out. The sick humor keeps us laughing uneasily, probing our reactions and preventing us from tying it all up in a neat little bow.

The last word about this episode should belong to Joan. It is a testament to Christina Hendricks’ portrayal of her as well as the amazing writing of this show that in an episode where a guy’s foot gets mangled by a tractor and blood literally spews across the office, the real tragedy and humanity of the night came from Joan Holloway Harris on her last day at work. I was horrified and moved when she actually wept in the office, I was impressed but not surprised when she ably administered a tourniquet on Guy’s bleeding leg, and I was both thrilled and saddened by the final moment of mutual appreciation between Joan and Don. I don’t know what will happen to Joan, now that she’s left Sterling Cooper and is stuck with her awful, incompetent, sexually abusive husband. The best hope for Sterling Cooper is that she’ll be coming back soon, because a day on which Guy McFerland walks into an advertising agency and Joan Holloway walks out does not spell a happy tomorrow.

Ha ha, Thursday nights! A new episode of The Office! And Bones, and Fringe, and Parks and Recreation! And by next week Thursday, there’ll also be new episodes of Grey’s Anatomy and Flash Forward, and then in October new episodes of 30 Rock will be on! In other words, ha ha, Thursday, the night that totally overwhelms my meager resources as a grad student/spare-time television blogger!

I love The Office so much it’s almost physically painful, and I’ll also admit to a soft spot for Bones and a love-hate relationship with Fringe, so I’m sure I’ll get to them all eventually. But last night definitely belonged to Community, the brand-new sitcom starring Joel McHale, my snarky TV commentator muse. Wait, stop. Stop right now. If you have ever laughed at some terrible reality show but never seen The Soup, go watch clips on hulu. On hearing McHale’s new pilot had been picked up by NBC, I had a brief nightmare that he’d stop filming The Soup, but apparently he’s able to do both, so I’m able to watch Community without feeling resentful.

Gillian Jacobs as Britta, Joel McHale as Jeff and Chevy Chase as Pierce Hawthorne on Community

Community has gotten some great buzz, including this NYTimes piece and some love from Televisionary and slate.com. The setting is a community college, where the main character Jeff Winger has enrolled to keep from being disbarred as a lawyer (he had previously been practicing with a fake degree). There are so many great things about this pilot episode. As the NYTimes article points out, the humor is largely based on allusion, so the script is peppered with Breakfast Club jokes, shout-outs to Bill Murray and Michael Douglas, and at least one super-meta-reference to The Soup. The acting is good, particularly Chevy Chase and John Oliver, who alas appears to not be a series regular, and the premise feels both fresh and relatable. There are also countless opportunities to mock a community college, but for the most part Community goes for the funny and avoids the low-hanging fruit. (In the pilot’s opening, the dean addresses the students after playing a tape recording of a collegiate-sounding clock tower.) I should probably also mention that I have been whistling the show’s absurdly catchy score for about twenty minutes now.

Danny Pudi as well-meaning but social inept Abed

Without those things, the show would be mediocre at best, but the true gem of the show is the main character Jeff. Although an entirely different personality, Jeff is built on the same ambiguity of The Office’s Michael Scott, slipping easily between ego-obsessed scholastic ennui and brief moments of sympathetic self-realization. Because he already has a successful law career, Jeff’s entire motivation is to get a degree as quickly and easily as possible, which includes regularly deriding the school and bribing a professor for test answers. “Why do people keep trying to teach me stuff in this school-shaped toilet?” he wonders. In the pilot, Jeff starts a Spanish study group just to hook up with his attractive classmate and then capitalizes on the study groups’ insecurities to escape his study-leader responsibilities. Jeff is a jerk.

Except, in a really lovely little piece of emotional development, Jeff ends the episode with just the slightest twinge of conscience. Abed, a classmate who registers on the autism-spectrum and has an unhealthy obsession with pop culture of the ‘80s and ‘90s, offers Jeff some useful information on Britta, the girl Jeff’s trying to attract. “Abed,” Jeff says in mock wonder, “I see your value now.” As Jeff walks away, Abed thinks for a moment and awkwardly raises his finger before replying, “that’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me.” By the episode’s conclusion, Jeff has realized he can’t get the test scores he needs and admits he never learned how to study because he’s always gotten by without actually working. The study group admits that even though he manipulated them, Jeff was a helpful member of their group. “I’m sorry I called you Michael Douglas and I see your value now,” Abed says. Rueful and only half-joking, Jeff ends the episode by muttering, “well, that’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me.”

That's the nicest thing anyone's ever said to me.

I have a lot of hope for Community – like Glee and The Office, it’s an incredibly tricky balancing act between sincerity and mockery, but shows that successfully navigate that maze can be rewarding television. If Community lives up to its promise, I might even forgive Joel McHale for shifting his focus away from The Soup. (Please don’t do it, Joel! The void left in my heart where Chat Stew used to be could never be filled.)

Greek returned last night for its third season, and so I return, once again, to ABC Family. But where I wept and gnashed my teeth over Secret Life of the American Teenager, parts of 10 Things I Hate About You, Ruby and the Rockits, and reveled in the complete absurdity of Make It or Break It…I come to you today from a more positive place. Because, I cannot lie – I thoroughly enjoy Greek.

Like most other ABC Family programming, Greek’s primary operating procedure is to drench everything in a thick syrup of unreality. Everything is bigger, more dramatic, more implausible, and much sillier than a life any of us would recognize. The show is about life in the fraternities and sororities at the fictional Cyprus-Rhodes University in Somewhere, Ohio, and nowhere has a Greek system ever had so many themed parties, annual competitions, rivalries, ancient fraternity origin stories, or inner sorority political catfights. The scrappy, good-natured, slovenly Kappa Tau house features a masterpiece of fraternal ingenuity – Vesuvius, a house-sized volcano that makes the skies rain down beer. Meanwhile, over at the prissy, supergirly Zeta Beta Zeta sorority house, girls gather in the pinker-than-pink dining room every morning for freshly baked low-calorie muffins and coffee served from shining silver samovars. Real life college living need not apply.

The morning after at Kappa Tau and Zeta Beta Zeta

So how is that Greek wins my love where Secret Life makes me nauseous?

First (and I recognize this point is particularly suited to my personal taste, but this is my blog so Hah!), unlike any other show on ABC Family since the tragic demise of The Middleman, Greek is completely, hilariously self-aware. Any show that casts Alan Ruck (aka Cameron from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off) as the university dean and then writes in a scene where a student explains to the dean why she thinks Ferris Bueller is the Great Gatsby of her generation gets an A in my book.

Greek is also surprisingly liberal, given the usual bent of the network’s traditional-family focused shows. I’ve written about how problematic the Christian plotlines are on Secret Life, but the bigger point is that teenage pregnancy is so shocking and earth-shatteringly amoral that it fuels an entire season with outrage and dismay. Unlike Secret Life, Greek features college kids hooking up, drinking and generally being rowdy without any suggestion of judgment or shame, an absence which frees the show to focus on character development rather than moral indoctrination. And those characters are also much, much more diverse: the main character, Rusty Cartwright, has two best friends in his year – Calvin, a preppy, athletic gay guy from his rival fraternity, and Dale, his super-Christian, conservative, academically driven roommate. Understandably, Calvin and Dale start out hating each other, but by the time the third season has rolled around, they hang out together with friendly equanimity, despite their ongoing disagreements. You could almost think you were watching a workplace diversity training video, except that it’s also consistently funny. Dale listens to recordings of Q from Star Trek reading from the Bible, which Rusty and Calvin grow to find calming. Calvin loves teasing Dale about the latent homoeroticism of his purity pledge group. Rusty, Calvin and Dale all ban together to study for finals. It’s heartwarming, endearing stuff.

Calvin and Dale

It’s also just hard to argue with a show as cheerfully fun-loving as Greek. Rusty may be the show’s central character, but the true heart of the Greek lies in Cappie, president of Kappa Tau. A stereotypical seventh-year senior, Cappie is the show’s Bacchus, always planning the next prank or party. He’s also surprisingly thoughtful, sincere, a loyal friend, and a great leader. Greek may not resemble anyone’s actual college experience, but with characters like Cappie as the organizing principle of the show, I almost wish my undergrad years were more like Cyprus Rhodes. (Almost.)

Apparently, this is the week I love Bravo reality shows (or former Bravo, sorry Project Runway). I just last night got around to watching the season finale of Top Chef Masters, which aired last week, and I would like to announce my huge chef crush on Rick Bayless. Of course, it’s impossible to know with reality shows what got cut and what was edited to appear differently than it actually happened, but from everything shown on Top Chef Masters, Rick Bayless comes off as the classiest, most professional, passionate, meticulous, talented guy. And come on, look at him! (This is after judge Jay Rayner announced that Rick took Jay’s molé virginity.)

Rick Bayless; Oaxacan black mole

Aside from my newfound love of Rick Bayless, I think it’s worth mentioning that Top Chef Masters

It's okay, Art Smith. You can stop crying now.

was a pretty classy show in a lot of ways. The dynamic between the chef-contestants was totally different than on any other reality show. Rather than the desperately fame-seeking former celebrities who show up on places like The Surreal Life or the painfully ambitious young designers trying to claw their way into Fashion Week on Project Runway, the men and women who participated on Top Chef Masters are all extremely successful chefs who are doing it entirely for charity, fun and bragging rights. Sure, they want to win, but their lives are not on the line, and they all seemed comfortable enough with themselves to not be too threatened by the competition.

That kind of participant led to an entirely different type of reality show than the standard worst-behavior-makes-the-best-television programming. These people were nice to each other. They genuinely liked and respected each other. Whenever they were able, they helped and praised each other. For the most part, they seemed like decent human beings. I’m telling you, it was like watching some alternate reality show universe! One of the better examples of this bizarre, Twilight Zone television experience was the mystery box challenge, where each chef had to fill a box with ingredients that another chef would have to cook with. On the regular Top Chef, or on really any other show, this is an opportunity to screw someone over. Put pig’s ear in there, or Cool Ranch Doritos, or frozen fish fillets. Fill it with stuff you know they hate. And instead, all of the chefs ran around Whole Foods trying to fill their baskets with stuff they knew their fellow chefs would love to cook with. Roy Yamaguchi gave Art Smith a box he was thrilled with, and Roy told the cameras, “I really believe you have to give people opportunities and set them up for success rather than failure.” I think it was a first in the history of reality television.

By the end, it was clear the producers had conned onto the make love, not war atmosphere, and started giving them challenges best suited to making great meals. The final challenge was for each chef to re-create their lives as chefs in a four course meal, beginning with their first food memories and working through the dish that made them want to be chefs, a dish associated with opening their first restaurants, and a dish that represented their futures. As Kelly Choi explained it to the chefs, their faces lit up with pleasure. (Kelly Choi, by the way, was the one dark spot on the whole feel-good experience. Kelly Choi had the charisma and sparkle of a Barbie doll. Kelly Choi made Padma Lakshmi look like a rocket scientist with the food skills of Jacques Pepin.)

Final three challengers: Rick Bayless, Hubert Keller, Michael Chiarello

It’s not as though they weren’t competitive, and Art Smith didn’t cry every episode, and some of the chefs didn’t swear incessantly. It was still good, dramatic, entertaining television. But unlike Rock of Love or The Bachelor, it didn’t leave you with a bitter taste in your mouth (or a visually-transmitted venereal disease). So here’s to you, Top Chef Masters. I’m glad the regular Top Chef has returned to fill the void you’re leaving behind, but you’ve left my expectations a bit higher than they were before, and I think anything else is going to feel a little disappointing.

After a long, convoluted and legally complex hiatus, Project Runway came back last week. Despite its new home on the Lifetime network, the show looks essentially unchanged, although it’s now accompanied by a bevy of network-building spinoffs (Models of the Runway, Project Runway All-Star Challenge). Hungry, arrogant, self-involved designers with touching life stories and wacky hairdos run around like mad people trying to create a fabulous piece of clothing in an unreasonably short period of time. Nina Garcia and Michael Kors snipe, Heidi Klum giggles and wrinkles her nose, and Tim Gunn is lovely. Welcome back, Project Runway.

One annoying quality of this new season is the surprisingly high number of weepy contestants – or has it always been this way and I just don’t remember? Johnny gets a little bit of a pass on this, because at least he had a fittingly dramatic backstory to justify his emotional breakdown and the subsequent Tim Gunn lovefest, but the rest were just egregious. Ra’mon, who was apparently a med student in neurosurgery and then decided to become a fashion designer? I am not moved enough by your passion for clothing to find your tears endearing. Also, you say this about your career history: “I went to med school specializing in neurosurgery, and towards the end decided that it was one thing to have a career I could be really great at, it was another thing to have a career I could be passionate about.” Oh yes, I too weep for your dreams, incredibly skilled neurosurgeon who almost made it through med school before finding himself.

Ra'Mon the former neurosurgeon, trying not to cry; Tim Gunn comforting Johnny

Ari's transformative clothing

Other than that, it was the same, familiar situations, but this time set in LA. Mitchell sent his model down the runway essentially nude, and Heidi said some bitchy things about models pretending to be taller and skinnier than they actually are. Louise is really into vintage Hollywood. Malvin is into androgyny and doesn’t watch the red carpet because he doesn’t differentiate between “different colored carpets.” Another designer, Ari, is all about avant-garde, experimental clothing, which leads to this amazing sentence: “I’m really into the idea of transformative clothing that would go into a tent, that would also have water purification systems, and you would be comfortable in it.” I can’t really understand what she’s talking about, or envision what those designs would look like, but just based on her concept and some of the images they show, I think she’s actually trying to make us all stillsuits so we can survive the desert sands of Arrakis. And you know, I’m okay with that. Too bad Michael and Nina couldn’t understand the usefulness of scifi fashion and decide to eliminate Ari. You’ll regret it when we’re running a mélange-based economy, Michael Kors!

Project Runway and Top Chef have always been my favorite reality competition shows, because at least the standard drama, backstabbing and weeping is set within the context of people performing a skill I find impressive. It’s silly, the contestants are absurd but take themselves extremely seriously, there’s high tension and surprise, and it makes a nice break from trying to write carefully about amazing shows like Mad Men and upsetting shows like Toddlers and Tiaras. So, welcome back Project Runway. I missed you.

You guys… Mad Men came back. Just in case you haven’t seen it yet, I’ll put this entry after the jump. read more…

Slings & Arrows deserves much more thought than I gave it yesterday, because it really is well-made and smart and funny and dark and ambitious and all of those lovely things. I wouldn’t call it particularly fun, because it’s uncomfortable to watch the main character go mad and carry on full conversations with the theater’s former, deceased artistic director. Still, it’s uncomfortable in a sharp, intelligent way, which allows the viewer to feel certain that the unpleasantness is worthwhile, and will be made up for by a deeper satisfaction in the end.

Aside from the show’s incredible writing, the large and talented cast, and its dedication to praising Shakespeare at every turn, my primary impression turns out to be way more trivial. Every other minute, I am just blown away by how Canadian it is. The whole fictional New Burbage Festival is self-consciously engaged in the perpetuation of culture in a way that seems incomparable with any single American institution. There is actually a Minister of Culture who shows up every few episodes and has to be convinced to continue funding the festival. The perception that New Burbage Festival has a responsibility to Canadian citizens extends throughout the inner festival workings, so that every decision about what play to put on, what actor to cast, what it means when Americans are on stage, and whether or not to dilute the festival with musical, becomes a gesture of Canadian selfhood.

A popular New Burbage hotspot: Yong's Canadian and Chinese Food

Plus, everyone constantly apologizes for everything. Okay, it’s an easy and possibly unfair point to make, but you would not believe how often these characters say “sorry!” to each other. Ellen Fanshawe, the diva lead company actress, goes on stereotypical actress rampages, shows up late to rehearsal, and has knock-down blow out fights with her directors, but still finishes each tirade with “Sorry, everybody. Sorry!” Not only is it sort of a revelation to watch a show where people manage to disagree while also being decent human beings, the constant focus on civility highlights one of the show’s most interesting themes – the relationship between art and business.

New Burbage Festival's leadership: Artistic director on left, business director on right

One of the original things about Slings & Arrows’s depiction of the New Burbage theater company is the focus on acting as a profession. The characters are all artists, devoted to the stage and constantly feeding off the emotional intensity necessary to perform well, but they’re also business colleagues who have to live and work with each other year after year. The art vs. business theme continues into the sillier side of the show, which involves many clashes between the festival’s business director and the artistic director and frequently revels in the business director’s secret love of musical theater. The debate adds a real-world component to the fancy literary premise, and I think it’s a debate Shakespeare would have been engaged in himself. In an American show, it would seem disingenuous for art to win out in the end, but from the Canadian perspective, where culture has its own dedicated minister in the government, it’s almost believable.

Although summer TV does seem to be dominated by bad, trashy, poorly written or reality-contest based programming, it also has an important role for the networks. Summer programming is the place for television misfits. It can be the moment to test quirky outsiders like last summer’s The Middleman, which never found an audience and died tragically under-appreciated, or it can be a dumping ground for shows that no one knows what to do with. The classic case-in-point this summer was Pushing Daisies, which was built as a big fall season show two years ago, got all messed up by the writer’s strike, and then returned only to quickly die. Except, when ABC stopped airing Pushing Daisies this year, there were still three episodes that hadn’t been shown. What to do with three lonely, orphaned episodes? Just play ‘em randomly in the middle of the summer!

The other major example of this phenomenon has been NBC’s original drama Kings. It launched last season with a tepid publicity push, and then NBC realized they had absolutely no idea what to do with it. The show was tabled until the summer season, when the few remaining episodes aired every Saturday at 8pm. I’m pretty sure even CSI would eventually die if new episodes played on Saturday nights in July. Needless to say, Kings has not been renewed, and when the last new episode aired this weekend, it was with the sense of watching a ghostly apparition walking around waiting for someone to put it to rest. Another one bites the dust, this is a dead parrot, kick the bucket, dead on arrival, poor Judd is dead, Death in Venice, ashes to ashes, Death Valley, death be not proud, Deathly Hallows, deader than a doornail.

Except! Except. Kings was actually a pretty great show. It had its weaknesses, and some episodes were predictable, and some of the acting was amateurish. But at its best, Kings was an astonishingly original television show with an amazing lead actor, a beautiful visual and verbal style, a fertile, high-concept premise, and some awesome ideas. For the millions who haven’t heard of it much less seen it –

Ian McShane as King Silas; David stands up to a modern Goliath

Kings uses a retelling of the biblical story of David to imagine what a religiously driven monarchy would be like in the twenty-first century. That last part is interesting enough in and of itself. What does it look like when a modern, wealthy, technologically advanced country is run solely from the whims of one guy? It’s a fascinating thought, particularly when that guy is King Silas, charismatic and powerful and intelligent and dark, and played by Ian McShane. Watching a king decree his absolute power over a country that looks so uncannily like our own gives Kings a healthy dollop of political innuendo, but God is really the most fascinating presence on the show.

In many ways, Kings is most clearly related to a vastly different show: Battlestar Galactica. For both shows, the larger premise drives the main action and shapes each episode, but the presence of an unknowable supernatural influence motivates characters and defines the tone. While most of the plot revolves around defeating the Cylons or eliminating political enemies, God and faith lie at the core of every dramatic turning point and every emotional climax. Both shows were ambitious, striving to depict universes with characters both human and divine.

David as God's chosen one

Why, then, did Kings fail so dramatically when Battlestar Galactica has been a huge success? The easiest, and probably accurate answer has a lot to do with where they came from. While Battlestar Galactica had a hyped up, curious audience and a narrowly-defined cable channel to nurture its growth, Kings was thrown into a network schedule seeking to reach the most people with the least effort. In addition, what was then the clearly named SciFi channel knew how to sell their product. From the beginning, Battlestar Galactica was a space opera, with the bonus of some intense, socially relevant religious commentary. NBC never knew what Kings was, much less who might conceivably want to watch it.

I’m going to talk in more detail about Kings tomorrow, but it’s important to consider what happened to this show as a potential morality tale for what’s happening on network television. The King is dead. Long live the…?